Gayl Jones's Corregidora Madhu Dubey argues tha

Madhu Dubey argues that dating back to the time of the publication of Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in 1974, black feminist literary critics have used the metaphor of matrilineage to authorize the construction of a black feminine literary tradition (Dubey 245). Consequently, essays by such critics tend to posit the mother as the origin of the black women's literary tradition, as well as the guarantor of the tradition through time. Dubey argues that this black feminist appropriation of the metaphor of literary matrilineage acquires special resonance from the peculiar history of black motherhood in America (245). The significance of this tradition is exemplified in a novel such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora. Specifically, Jones uses the novel to demonstrate the strength of the tradition and its temporal significance and to illustrate how one woman breaks through the possibly debilitating effects of such a tradition on individual self-realization.

Historical representation plays an important and thoroughly problematized role in Corregidora. Jones portrays such representations as contested fields that persist into the present rather than as a series of past, finished events (McKible 224). Because slavers destroyed evidence that could later incriminate them, only the oral history surrounding Ursa's name preserves the knowledge of the indignities experienced by her foremothers. As agents of historical preservation, the Corregido

se "blues talks about the simultaneity of good and bad . . . . Blues acknowledges all different kinds of feelings at once" (Gottfried 561). Dubey also notes that several historians of slavery have testified that reproduction constituted a site of oppression as well as power for black women slaves (Dubey 246). Particularly following the 1808 law banning the importation of slaves into the United States, the slave woman was appraised primarily for her reproductive capacity--"property that reproduced itself without cost" (Dubey 246). Thus, the black slave woman's experience of reproduction was characterized by the contradiction of her economic value as a breeder of slaves with the ideological devaluation of her desire to mother her children (Dubey 246). In Portuguese, corregidore means "colonial magistrate," implying the extent of Corregidora's power over his slaves and their descendants and underscoring the legality of his brutality. In Spanish, corregidora translates as "the wife of a chief magistrate," which conveys the psychosexual domination that continues to disable the Corregidora women well into the twentieth century; they are all effectively his wives in the novel. But the word corregidora also incorporates the sense

Category: Literature - G